14 Million Users Exposed by Facebook Privacy Bug

Facebook has been having a lot of problems lately and these issues are affecting millions of people. Social media platforms give you the option to add privacy filters to your posts, developers understand that users want to keep certain information hidden. Facebook however, just reported that a bug may have affected the privacy of 14 million users. When you log on the social media platform, you’re given the option to determine who can see your posts. Audience filters are categorized by “Only me, Friends & Public.”

Only Me: Allows only you to view your posts

Friends: Allows you and your friends to see it

Public: Allows everyone and their mother.

Thanks to Facebook’s bug, it doesn’t matter which filter you think you used because your settings were switched to Public. This means that if you were one of those users, everyone and their mother could see your Facebook posts. This leads me to think that Facebook didn’t get the privacy memo.

If you think you enabled the privacy filter on your Facebook post between May 18th-27th and that you’re safe, think again. The bug started after they were making an attempt to create a new way to share featured items. Although Facebook’s intentions were not bad, it’s yet another ball dropped by the social media giant in the last year or so.

Millions of users use this social media platform to connect with family, friends, and share their wildest moments together—but there are many reasons why people would not want their posts to be public. In this day and age, jobs look at potential candidates’ social media before hiring them. No one wants a job to see when they got drunk and decided to make a couple bad decisions last summer. Small privacy errors like this from Facebook time and time again could potentially cost someone a job opportunity.

How Does Facebook Respond to These Users?

Facebook responds with “We recently discovered a technical error between May 18th and 27th that automatically suggested a public audience when you were creating posts. We apologize for this mistake. The problem has been fixed, and we changed the audience of any post you made to what you had been using before, just in case. You can review the posts you made during this time.”

The company has made some mistakes and it’s great they’re acknowledging those mistakes, but it’s like that person who keeps cheating on you after you’ve taken them back so many times. It gets tiring, and nobody wants to keep hearing sorry. Sure, you can use one of those fancy cell phone spy apps to discover what they’re doing, but who wants to have to go through that?

The Verdict

Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. When you have such a large platform, there’s a lot of responsibility that goes into maintaining it. While Facebook continuously helps us to connect with old friends and family, privacy is a big issue. Hopefully, they fix this issue and we can call it a thing of the past. What do you think will happen next? Will there be a new social media king? Let us know what you think in the comments below.